Lena Horne 1917-2010

We lost Lena Horne at the weekend - but this sensational YouTube clip reminds us what a great performer she was. It also reinforces the notion that many great singers get better as their voices age - like good vintage wines. I've noticed that in Sarah Vaughn and Mel Torme too recently. This performance also illustrates the fact that great musicians articulate songs in a manner packed with sincerity. She sings 'Stormy Weather' as if she is living its sentiments.

Art Tatum - the John Coltrane of the piano

I've been struggling to get Art Tatum - the Pablo Solo Masterpieces onto my iPod in time for our annual Xmas cocktail party. I won't embarrass myself by recording how difficult it's been to master the control panel of iTunes. But I'll admit that because I didn't refuse duplicates, some of the 140+ tracks were recorded more than once. So I had to listen to repeat tracks on test playback via my new Bose docking system (which is pretty good).

What's to worry? Tatum is just pure genius - especially on his own. And it struck me tonight, listening to that huge repertoire of the Great American Song Book, that he treats the material just like John Coltrane.

First there's a deep appreciation of the basic melody - including the unstated lyrics. But almost immediately the theme has been expressed he goes off into improvisations which include variations in tempo and rhythm; changes in key signature which follow the harmonic structure of the song; bravura arpeggios which punctuate any available space; and mind-bending references to other parts of the same song.

Rather surprisingly for a great jazz pianist, he doesn't improvise in melodic terms, and he does't often quote from other songs. But what he creates is simultaneously a sincere homage to the original and a re-creation which is instantaneously recognisable as his own voice.

Barak Obama and American Culture

It would seem that the whole world has been watching the inauguration speech today. Certainly an auspicious occasion - but an oration couched in vague terms, abstractions, and metaphors which leave everything open to interpretation. My guess is that Obama will rapidly become mired in the military-political complex no less than his predecessors. I am always mindful of the pub quiz type fact that contrary to popular opinion, the president who took the USA into the war in Vietnam was J.F. Kennedy, and the president who took it out was Nixon. How's that for an irony and contradiction?

Meanwhile, the force of American cultural values continue to run energetically beneath the surface of all this popular glitz. In the last few days I have been reading some of the less well known stories of Henry James - an American writer who actually became a British citizen during the first world war. And I have been listening again with renewed enthusiasm to the music of Jimmy Scott, a singer who hardly anybody knows but who is the greatest male ballad singer of all time. You only need to throw in David Mamet's 'Glenngary, Glenn Ross' which I watched on DVD the other night, and John Adams' 'Nixon in China' which I bought at knock-down price on CD recently - and that tells us something that Barak really can be proud of.

Floratone

Ever since I got DJ-style earphones plugged into my new eee PC at night I've been listening to one CD over and over again. It's Bill Frissell's collaboration with studio musicians and technicians called Floratone. Part blues, part Southern country music, rather white, but very funky and listenable. It's a series of riffs which have been deeply layered in post recording with loops, fades, sound wipes, and all sorts of electronic effects, featuring guitars and percussion with occasional trumpet which has been morphed to sound almost like another digital instrument. In fact I've listened to it so much that Last.fm have kicked me off more than once. But they're so tolerant - you just move on a track or two and start again. Good old Asus. Good old Last.fm. All highly recommended. Give it a listen. I guarantee that tracks from this CD will appear as theme music on a film track before too long now.

Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life

John Adams is probably the best-known American composer of classical music alive today. His operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer have played to audiences all over the world, and his orchestral sketch Short Ride in a Fast Machine is such a favourite concert opener that you hear it on the radio almost every day in some setting or other. A post-war baby of musical parents, he was raised on the east coast in New England, and after a childhood as a clarinetist of some distinction he moved to study at Harvard. There he seemed destined for a life as an academic composer. But two things seemed to have worked against this: an adventurous, rebellious spirit, and a love of popular American culture, which as he matured in the 1960s included imported English pop music, dance bands (in which his father played) and television. Rejecting the conventional route to success, he took another which led him to the west coast, where after a bout of proletarian enthusiasm he gave up the 48 hour week of a warehouse worker to take up a teaching post at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco... Read more >>

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Scandals in Classical Music

Norman Lebrecht is a writer and pundit specialising in classical music who often appears on Radio 3 taking phone-in commentaries on what are supposed to be controversial topics such as "Should government subsidise the Arts?" and "Is the Internet taking over from print journalism?". He comes across in the spoken word as a pushy and self-aggrandising windbag, but I must say that in print the same approach makes for lively reading. What he offers here is a history of recording classical music, from its faltering start at the beginning of the last century, to the present. His main argument is that what was at first perceived as a somewhat impure medium gradually took hold of the public imagination when the technology became affordable in the form of the LP record and then the CD. This led to an explosion of recording the classics ... Read more >>

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New American Music

I spent what for me is a traditional Boxing Day evening listening to experimental music with my friend Robin Hobbes in his conservatory and musical studio in Bowden, Cheshire. Well, I say listening, but we only enjoyed snatches before our significant others complained that it should be turned off. First we sampled Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) the Communist sympathiser who after fighting in the Spanish Civil War spent most of his adult life writing for player-piano in a garage, holed up in Mexican exile to avoid the CIA. Wonderful up-tempo boogie-woogie almost made the household dogs howl. This is music which is too dense and complex for human beings to perform. Following the first complaints we switched to Morton Feldman (1926-1987) and enjoyed the opposite experience - music which is both quiet, slow, and lasts a long, long time. We didn't get very far into the five hour long String Quartet II before the hints came in thick and fast that we'd better jack it in , or there would be no dinner served. So I resolve to go back to these intriguing artists in the safety of my own office.